Gladstone resigns as British prime minister, after a defeat on the budget, and is followed by a minority government headed by Conservative leader Lord Salisbury

The American portrait-painter John Singer Sargent makes London his home and begins an immensely successful career

Gladstone becomes Britain's prime minister again, after joining forces with the Irish Nationalists to defeat Lord Salisbury's government

Gladstone's bill promising Home Rule for Ireland splits the Liberal party in Britain's House of Commons

Robert Louis Stevenson introduces a dual personality in his novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

The split in the Liberal party over Home Rule results in a defeat for Gladstone and the return of Lord Salisbury as Britain's prime minister

The Home Rule campaign for Ireland prompts a Scottish Home Rule Association to fight in a related cause

Thomas Hardy publishes his novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, which begins with the future mayor, Michael Henchard selling his wife and child at a fair

Joseph Conrad becomes naturalized as a British subject and continues his career at sea in the far East

Those in Britain's Liberal party opposing Home Rule for Ireland become a separate group under the name of Unionists

Sherlock Holmes features in Conan Doyle's first novel, A Study in Scarlet

Queen Victoria's golden jubilee brings her back into the public's affection

A gathering of leaders from the British empire holds a colonial conference in London to coincide with Queen Victoria's jubilee

Eadweard Muybridge publishes Animal Locomotion, a folio volume containing 781 pages of photographs

An undetected murderer, slitting the throats of seven London prostitutes, becomes known by the public as Jack the Ripper

23-year-old Irish author William Butler Yeats publishes his first volume of poems, The Wanderings of Oisin

English musicologist George Grove completes publication of his four-volume Dictionary of Music and Musicians

Charles Steward Parnell is cited as co-respondent in a divorce case brought against Kitty O'Shea

The Fabian Society publishes Essays in Socialisman influential volume of essays edited by Bernard Shaw

A vast cantilever bridge, spanning a mile of water, carries the railway across the Firth of Forth in Scotland

The world's first electric underground railway passes under the Thames, linking the City of London and Stockwell

Scottish anthropologist James Frazer publishes The Golden Bough, a massive compilation of contemporary knowledge about ritual and religious custom

9-year-old Daisy Ashford imagines an adult romance and high society in The Young Visiters

Britain cedes the tiny island of Heligoland to Germany in return for vast areas of Africa

A Gaelic pressure group, the Highland Association, is founded to preserve the indigenous poetry and music of Scotland